


The Kinds of Beings

by ifeelbetter



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-28
Updated: 2014-01-28
Packaged: 2018-01-10 09:26:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1157990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ifeelbetter/pseuds/ifeelbetter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aurora and Mulan are left alone in the charred remains of a fairytale land with nothing but a new quest: to find a heart for Phillip. Their best hope seems to be Baba Yaga.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Kinds of Beings

**Author's Note:**

> I stopped watching Once Upon A Time about halfway through Season 2. This fic starts from where I left off watching canon. Also Baba Yaga. There's always room for Baba Yaga.

_What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow,  
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,  
You cannot say, or guess, for you only know,  
a heap of broken images._ T.S. Eliot.

When it was all over, Mulan and Aurora were left alone in a dead land. Even the woods seemed devoid of life and the charred trees bent inwards, back down towards the earth below. Their skeletal remains stood leafless, blackened, and lonely along the hills. 

It was better--easier--to silently agree that they would make their lives into a new story, a new quest. Better than staring down the empty trees. Better to focus on the quest. Better to ignore the silence around them. 

Mulan pulled out her map and adjusted it on the ground so that it faced north. Aurora knelt beside her and pointed wordlessly to one of the map’s edges, right above a tiny weathered tear in the paper.

“I remember a story about a road,” she said, answering Mulan’s unspoken question. “I think there’s a road that leads to another land.”

“Another land or,” Mulan asked, raising an eyebrow, “ _another_ land?”

Aurora rolled her eyes, but she couldn’t deny the affection. Mulan’s style was always equal parts melodrama and restrained stoicism. “ _Another_ land, the kind that might have people,” Aurora said. 

They both looked upwards at the silent trees above them. The unspoken again: _not here, not where even the sky is dead._

Mulan and Aurora both stared at the map for a moment more in silence. It was littered with the marks for towns and cities, little arrows pointing towards notable dwellings, and scribbled notes denoting various creatures and their habitations. It looked like a land full of life, ready to swell like a living sea and break over the lonely traveler. 

But they’d seen the last of them lying dead in the mud and the land wasn’t full of anything anymore.

“West it is, then,” Mulan agreed.

* * *

It grew colder as they traveled west and soon there were snowflakes clinging to the air around them. As the bleak tree branches disappeared under the dusting of white, they could almost convince themselves that something other than blackened ash lay underneath. They could almost believe the land was sleeping through the winter, not dead.

The bridge at the western edge of the kingdom turned out to be a woefully simple bridge of wood and rope. It crossed a crevice in the forest floor that didn’t look wide or deep enough to justify a bridge. Somehow, the forest on the other side still looked hazy, like a mist hung over it. The planks of the bridge creaked when Mulan pressed her foot onto them. The bridge held, though, and that was the important part. It didn’t look magical. It just looked like a bridge.

Aurora sat down on a stump to wait for Mulan to declare the bridge safe and pulled her cloak a bit tighter around her. 

“It looks like it’s just a bridge,” Mulan declared finally, after having tugged and tapped every bit of the bridge she could reach from the safety of the secure ground. 

Aurora tilted her head and scrutinized the bridge. “Maybe it _is_ just a bridge.”

And in the space of a blink of her eyes, she was suddenly sharing the stump with a tiny, shriveled old man.

“Of course it’s not _just a bridge_ ,” he grumbled. He kicked at the stump with the heels of his feet, his tiny legs dangling just shy of the ground. “It’s _always_ magic.”

Aurora jumped up and Mulan put her hand on the hilt of her sword.

The old man sighed. He kicked the stump again.

“I’m supposed to ask you if you’ll share your lunch,” the man said mournfully. “I would have asked you, maybe a year ago.” He blinked, suddenly confused. “Or was it thirty years ago? No, definitely a year. A year ago.”

“What happened a year ago?” Aurora asked, putting a hand out to stop Mulan from pulling her sword out altogether. The quiet slink of metal against metal was threatening enough, no one needed the blade to actually leave its place at Mulan’s side. 

“I would have asked you to share your lunch a year ago, that’s what happened a year ago,” the man repeated slower, like Aurora was half-witted. “Anyway. There’s no point now. I don’t care if you’re good or not.”

“Mulan has the last of the palace’s cured meats in her pack. It’s old, but we’d share that,” Aurora admitted. She wasn’t following much of what the old man was saying but, well. Everybody needs a meal. “This is Mulan. I’m Aurora.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Mulan said gruffly, the pleasantry pulled out of her against her will. Her hand didn’t leave her sword-hilt.

“I don’t care,” the man repeated. “And you won’t be getting any magic trinkets from me either, don’t go expecting any magic talismans or whatnot!” He picked at something under one of his nails and then chewed on another.

“We don’t expect anything from you,” Aurora promised. “We were just leaving.”

“Mind you,” the man continued, still chewing on the nail of his left pinky, “if we’d all still been here, I would have done the whole thing for you two. One of us would have met you by the creek a mile back, and someone else would probably be waiting on the other side, and I’d have been here.”

Mulan looked at Aurora in the way that Aurora was beginning to recognize as _Can I cut it with my sword yet?_

She shook her head.

“And he’d have asked you to share your lunch, I’d have asked you to help me across, and the other’un would have asked for a taste of water.” The man sniffed loudly. “That’s how it was.”

Aurora remembered the creek. Mulan had refilled their water. They would easily have had enough for another person--especially one as small as this man--to drink all he could want.

“Did you _want_ \--” she started to ask.

The man hit the stump with the palm of his hand with enough force that it echoed through the forest.

“That’s how it _was_ , I said, I’m not asking for anything now!” he shouted. His tiny face seemed to tilt downwards in his rage; all the wrinkles on his paper-thin skin were collecting at his deep frown.

“You could have some anywa--” she tried again.

“Shut up! Shut up! _Shut up!_ ” the man screeched, sticking his fingers in his ears. “I already said: _I don’t care if you’re good_.”

Mulan gripped the hilt of her sword a little tighter.

The old man sighed a weary sigh, the kind that only comes from a prodigious amount of time spent living. 

“For old time’s sake,” he said finally, resigned. “For them that’s gone--cursed and dead alike--I’ll do you this one favor.”

“We didn’t ask--” Mulan started to argue, bridling, but Aurora gripped her arm.

“Any favor would be a kindness,” she said firmly to the old man. 

“There’s a woman you’ll meet,” he said, meeting Aurora’s eyes for the first time. “She doesn’t want you to win and she’ll do her damnedest to see you fail. She’s the one you need to see about your wish.”

“Who is she?” Aurora asked but Mulan started speaking at the same time.

“How do you know about our quest?” Mulan asked, her eyes narrowing.

“She’ll ask for things, she’ll try to trick you,” the man continued, ignoring both questions. “But the secret is: take what you can carry and run as fast as you can.”

He stood and stretched, bones cracking like logs on a fire.

“I call her Baba Yaga.”

And then he was gone.

* * *

Mulan and Aurora crossed the bridge. They had seen stranger things, after all.

* * *

On the other side of the bridge, the snow was up to their knees and their breath froze in the air around them. Mulan would have turned around, would have gone back to find warmer clothes, but the bridge and the crevice had both vanished behind them.

“ _Another_ land,” Aurora said with a shrug. “There’s always a trick.”

Mulan didn’t smile. “I don’t like tricks,” she said simply. 

This time Aurora rolled her eyes but didn’t say anything.

* * *

They didn’t have to follow the path for long--a deep trench cut through the snow all the way down to the withered grass, nothing subtle about it--before they found a small hut.

The hut was more than enough to stop them both in their tracks. It was plain, yes, but it was perched precariously on three spindly chicken legs, each bent and tucked away beneath one another. The hut tilted dangerously close to the ground on one side. As they watched, the house shifted slightly. One of the legs twitched, stretched, and tucked itself away again. From inside the hut, there was a loud crash as the hut moved to accommodate the shifting leg. 

“Shit,” someone said inside the hut. 

Aurora looked at Mulan. Mulan’s hand was back on her sword-hilt and she looked about two seconds away from the _Can I cut it with my sword?_ face. 

“I’m guessing this is her,” Aurora said. 

“We don’t have to go in,” Mulan said. “There are other ways--we could find--”

The door of the hut opened creakily. 

“My grandmother always said--” came the voice from inside the hut, louder this time, “--you need to shit or get off the pot.”

Mulan’s eyebrows contracted into the befuddled expression that Aurora found unpredictably adorable. 

“...what?” Mulan asked the open doorway.

A woman appeared in the doorway. She was older even than the man across the bridge had been, but she wore it better. Her age was apparent in the fissure-crack wrinkles at her eyes and in the stoop of her shoulders, but it had settled comfortably there. She had a comically large black bowl perched on one hip and was grinding some sort of purple powder with a matching black pestle. 

“In or out, kids?” she asked. “I can’t wait around here all day, you know.”

Aurora straightened her shoulders. “In,” she said with as much confidence as she could muster.

The woman nodded, stepped back, and motioned them inside with the pestle. It was smoking at the tip. The smoke sparkled faintly purple. 

Aurora went first. The woman grabbed Mulan’s hand as she passed.

“Only of your own free will, mind you,” she said. “Not if you’re here by compulsion. It’s a rule.”

“There is no compulsion that could bind me against my will,” Mulan replied solemnly. And it was absolute truth, Aurora knew, because Mulan didn’t bend for anything. The woman took a deep breath, like she was tasting the air Mulan had just breathed out. 

“Oh, I _like_ you,” the old woman decided and clapped Mulan on the shoulder. “You will call me Jězě.” She pointed the pestle at Aurora next. “But you call me Baba Yaga.”

“Why do only I have to--” Aurora started to complain and then caught up with the conversation. “Wait, so you’re the woman who can help us get a wish?”

“Well, yes and no,” Baba Yaga said. “Certainly that’s the function I play in your narrative and, by extension, that would be the entirety of my identity from your point of view. But I have other functions and other names and you can’t ever completely ignore the multiplicity of a person’s nature.” 

She was apparently done grinding the purple powder and poured it carefully into a glass bottle with a funnel poking out of the stem. It tinkled prettily as it fell. 

“You have to pity the leftover characters in the old land,” she continued, shaking the bottle before plugging it. “The core of a character isn’t the character, you see, it’s the circumstances. We’ve been bound by our plots longer than we’ve had names and now--now, the plot’s gone wrong.” She sighed. “I imagine it’s quite vexing.”

“Is that what happened to the old man we--” Mulan started to ask, waving back towards the path. 

“Oh, absolutely,” Baba Yaga said. “But you both lost the plot too, didn’t you?” 

“The...plot?” Aurora asked. 

“I can’t help but notice--” she said, sniffing as if she was admitting to committing a social faux pas, “--a distinct lack of _happily ever after_ with you two. A fulfilled function but a lack of narrative finality.” 

They both stared at her blankly. Aurora decided to ignore everything she didn’t understand for the moment and return to it later.

“We’re on a quest,” she said.

Baba Yaga put down the bottle and turned to give them her full attention. She seemed to....puff up, almost, like a bird plumping its feathers. The twinkle in her eye wasn’t so much a twinkle anymore as it was a glint, like the point of a knife. The air around her had changed, darkening and getting denser by the minute.

“Yes, down to business,” Baba Yaga said. She winked at Mulan, crinkling a thousand wrinkles around her eyes, but the wink didn’t seem jovial anymore. It seemed like she was mocking them. “I bet she’s always like this. All work and no play, you know what they say about _that._ ”

Mulan frowned. 

“We need a wish to bring a heart back,” Aurora said, refusing to be distracted. “We’ve been told you can help us.”

“I’m not sure I like her tone anymore,” Baba Yaga told Mulan in a sing-song voice. “And I know I don’t think I like her smell.”

“If you can’t help us, we’ll continue on our way,” Aurora finished lamely. She knew when a conversation went over her head and this one was going on somewhere in the stratosphere above her. 

“We don’t want a conflict, Jězě” Mulan clarified. “We would be willing to pay for what you give.”

Baba Yaga froze and then, like exhaling a sigh, settled back into her previous size. She shifted her right shoulder so that it popped and crackled.

“I knew I liked you,” she said and patted Mulan’s cheek in a grandmotherly way. It was disconcerting how quickly she shifted between the slow menace of a moment before and this kindly old woman. “You should learn a thing or two about business from this one,” she told Aurora, nodding towards Mulan. “You don’t make demands of your host, you make offers.”

“I’m not sure what we can offer you,” Aurora said. “But what we have, we would happily trade.”

Baba Yaga’s eyes glowed amber, twinkling with the light from the window. 

“I could take a memory,” she said thoughtfully. “I could take one of the rosy ones, the ones with the boy.” The way she looked at Aurora seemed to go right through her, straight through and out the other side. “I could take the one where he put your fingers through his--”

_\--and Philip said, “I didn’t know I could feel so much.” But he said it so quietly. He laughed with her--because you had to laugh at a sentence like that, said out loud, stupidly earnest--but the way their fingers fit together, like their hands were made with slots the perfect size for this, just for this moment--_

“No, I can see you need that one,” Baba Yaga said with her crooked smile. “I wouldn’t want that one out of circulation, not when it’s got work yet to do.” She tapped a fingernail against the lip of the black bowl. “I could take a memory you don’t have yet and you’d never know it was gone.” She was looking at Mulan now. 

Mulan shifted under the scrutiny.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? The end of the quest, I could take the happily ever after away and you’d never know you missed it.”

“You can’t take--” Aurora started to say, annoyance obvious in her voice despite her efforts to keep it at least placid. This woman was powerful and dangerous, that much was clear, and you don’t antagonize where you can’t win.

“I’m not sure I want your permission--not sure I _care_ ,” Baba Yaga continued, the easy menace back. “I think maybe I just want her little heartbreak. I could weave it into my winter cloak, give it a bit of melancholy sparkle. Nothing sparkles like heartbreak and tears.”

Mulan’s hand was clenched around the hilt of her sword but she didn’t move to unsheath it.

“Or I could just eat you both, bake you into a nice pie.” Baba Yaga smiled, all wrinkles and grandmotherly charm and the hint of something sharp underneath. “I have some lovely spices out back, you might be delicious. The basil should be ready, at the very least.”

This time Mulan got her sword halfway out before Aurora caught her hand.

“You can have the memory of Philip,” she said decisively. Because this is what she knew: (a) if Baba Yaga wanted you dead, you’d probably end up dead and (b) she could re-make a memory, but no one comes back from pie. “I don’t need it.”

“I won’t allow it,” Mulan said fiercely. “Your memories are your own, she can’t have them.”

“I like how you think you get to choose what I take, you silly insects,” Baba Yaga said. “You track your muddy shoes into my house, you demand things from me, and then you think you can dictate what I take from you.” She grinned a crocodile grin. “I’m not that kind of narrative device.”

“Jězě.”

Mulan’s voice gripped something in Aurora. She _would_ do this now, of course. She _would_ find new reserves of sacrifice, new subterraneous supplies of pure generosity, right when Aurora needed her to be strong. Aurora could see the offer forming--

“Why steal what I would willingly give, Jězě?” Mulan said simply. “Take all my heartbreak and may it give you joy.”

Baba Yaga’s eyes were fixed on Mulan with a hawkish precision. Whatever she saw in Mulan’s face made the threat bleed away.

“Poor child,” she said, and gripped Mulan’s hand in her bony, wrinkled one. “I haven’t met one like you in an age. You were built for tragedy, weren’t you?”

Mulan’s jaw tightened but she said nothing. 

“Tell you what,” Baba Yaga said. “You two go out back and pull up the potatoes, it should be about autumn now.” She checked her pocket watch to be sure. “Yes, should be autumn. Bring me enough potatoes to fill this bag.”

She pulled from a thin bag from her apron pocket and handed it to Mulan.

“Fill it and we’ll call it even.”

Mulan nodded and took the bag. Aurora followed her quietly, not willing to be out of her sight. 

“Just you, mind.” Baba Yaga didn’t turn to face them where Mulan’s hand was on the back door. “Don’t let her touch the garden.”

Aurora opened her mouth to protest but Mulan’s elbow caught her in the ribs.

“I understand.”

“No, darling, I don’t think you do.” Baba Yaga smiled. “But you will.”


End file.
